Episode 187: Kaila

KailaAge: 19Location: Los Gatos, CaliforniaAddiction: AnorexiaWhat’s memorable: She weighs 80 pounds, first of all. A smart and beautiful girl from an upper crust traditional family with decent parents: it’s hard to understand what went so wrong that she has to go to such extremes in order to feel loved, but no one knows what goes on in other peoples’ heads. Kaila literally has days to live, but she feels powerful “going against the laws of nature.” It’s all very sad.

Official Synopsis: As a young girl, Kaila, 19, was raised in an affluent, image-conscious community where she felt teased for being overweight, and overlooked by her parents. Now, at a mere 80 pounds and eating only a few hundred calories a day, Kaila is literally starving herself to death to have what she’s always wanted–to be the center of her family’s attention. Her distraught parents have been told by Kaila’s doctors to prepare for her death, “Intervention is truly our last option,” says Kaila’s mother, “Please help us!”

Discussion

47 Responses to “Episode 187: Kaila”

I would love to know what happened to this girl. It was a horrible tragedy to hear she left treatment at the end of the show – I often think of her and wish her strength – but would love to know if she is still alive.

If she’s going to refuse treatment everyone should leave her alone and let her decide whether her life is worth living or not. It’s people like you all worrying about her that give her the energy to keep on with her illness. Like all interventionist say no codependency. That means stop caring until she can care for herself.

All of her social media links have been removed, the one web page that is still active has her trying to sell her artwork but the site they are sold has also been removed. She seems to have disappeared, hope she is ok and her disease hasn’t caused her to disappear from this earth.

Ahhh … the girl who felt “powerful” for surviving with that many health problems due to her anorexia. she kinda baffled me with that. i felt terrible for her family. hope shes many pounds heavier and healthy. and i hope her mentality about it changed too.

Growing up in Los Angeles is absolutely the most brutal place to live. I am from the Los Feliz neighborhood. Everyone is expected to live be blonde, skinny and tan. That’s just how SoCal living is. Some people can take very harsh criticism and others cant. I chose to leave my entire family behind in L.A. I opted for upstate NY and I’m blessed I get to live here.

I live in Los Gatos and it’s not in SoCal. It’s in the Bay Area in Northern California. Los Gatos is a beautiful, upscale community at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains and is an idyllic place to grow up. Not sure how or why Kaila’s brother said growing up in Los Gatos is rough. Those kids were lucky to grow up there and should appreciate what they have. I have great sadness for Kaila and her family but Kaila and her brother appear to have been spoiled rotten.

You totally missed the point and clearly came here to be snarky. You fail on both counts. The comfortable and privileged upbringing they acknowledge having is a common factor in eating disorders of ALL kinds. “I’m not worthy” is repeated both literally and figuratively. Kaila felt she didn’t deserve her life because she felt inadequate to her peers. Her brother said it was ‘rough’ because she was bullied as a kid, called fat to her face. I’m relieved to learn that Kaila is in recovery, about to graduate and back in her family fold.

No one picked up that she could have Borderline Personality Disorder? The fear of being alone, talking about doing things for attention, the smirks. She even said was happy for attention because she is making up for the time she was missing it and the smirk. Her brother had her number.

That’s a definite possibility. Anorexics are extremely hostile and manipulative people and so are people with borderline personality disorders. The behaviour of starving themselves or binging/purging is their way of manipulating, controlling and harming others – in other words, they harm themselves in order to hurt other people.

I’m of the opinion that anorexia and bulimia are behavioural disorders above and beyond all else (and a personality disorder is also a behavioural disorder), and that after the patient is medically treated and stabilized to get them out of immediate danger, the proper way to treat the disorder is through intensive behaviour modification therapy. They need to be taught that unhealthy attention-seeking behaviour and manipulative treatment of other people are unfair to others and therefore unacceptable, and they need to be taught more pro-social and productive alternative methods to express their anger, frustration and hostility toward others.

Nothing you said is correct. Nothing you said is backed-up by any research on eating disorders. You are clearly not a mental health professional nor have any education on eating disorders. So just stop. Seriously. People like you are so misinformed that you cause can cause serious harm. For the health and safety of people like Kaila, you should never associate with people who have mental illness.

This Janelle character has posted on this site’s pages grossly ignorant and twisted nonsense about mental illness and addiction. No one can be this asinine. She/he is doing it to annoy people and entertain herself/himself. She/he is a troll and should be banned from this website.

As a normal weight bulimic whose family lives in another part of the state, I was manipulating exactly zero people with my behaviors. Generalizations like these are not helpful when dealing with such problems. I was truly only hurting myself. No one even knew I had a problem.

Saw some very new pictures of Kaila and she appears to have relapsed. Very sad to see that considering she appeared to be doing well for a couple of years. She’s a very sweet girl and I wish the best for her and her family. I also hope she’s healthy by the time of her wedding 🙁

I follow Kaila on intagram and unfortunately its pretty clear she has relapsed. She is still engaged and appears to have a relationship with her family. I really hope she can recover again, she’s going to make a beautiful bride

She is probably losing weight again, because this is a hell that no one can ever escape. It never goes away. It just hides. And then the minute something goes wrong in your life, it is so easy to fall back into it. Don’t eat, your brain says. How can you eat now? Feel empty. Feel numb. Feel nothing. You will feel better. You will be miserable, but at least you will lose weight. And so it begins. Again.

This is hell, and after nearly 25 years, I’m beginning to wonder if anyone truly escapes. I hope she is okay, but I also know this devil well, and it does not like to leave until it steals your so. God bless you precious Kaila. I hope you beat the odds and have the wonderful life you deserve. I will pray for you and Emily and all the Intervention girls.